From Abby: The Diabetes/Sleep Equation.

Sleep. It is the thing I covet most, especially when I work late into the night and Birdy starts chirping oh-so-early in the morning. Sleep is a luxury when there's a little one trolling around your house, but when diabetes is the cause of my sleepless nights, it's less cute and more frustrating.

Seems like I'm not the only one battling it out on the overnights. Take it away, Abby!

* * *

Ever have those nights when you sleep like a zombie, and wake up to a CGM graph that was firmly planted between 110 mg/dL and 120 mg/dL the entire night, or a fingerstick that shows a fancy 100 mg/dL?

Yeah. Until last week, I can't remember the last one I had either. Steady diabetes nights are one of those like, super mysterious only-heard-about-in-commercials kind of nights. That steady graph or fingerstick lets you just sit in your bed an extra 30 seconds and think, "Heck yeah."

So anyway, this happened to me recently and of course I Tweeted about it (because despite my best efforts, I have been completely sucked into the Twitterverse). [Editor's note: HA! Mission accomplished.] My reaction to this straight line and rested feeling, after the initial, "I'm freeking awesome" was "Wait.. did I sleep so well because of the stable blood sugars, or was my sugar so stable because I was sleeping like a log?"

Chicken or egg, people; I was boggled. A few Twitter friends responded. One said that he attributed the stability of blood sugars to the good sleep. Another friend said she was also as clueless, but equally as thankful.

Add in the fact that I got about five hours of sleep the night before, and the fact that I haven't slept through the night my entire life unmedicated (there was that week I don't remember after getting my tonsils out, but that's a whole different story) - I don't know what to attribute this success to. Did I accurately carb count that pizza-feast I had for dinner, added to my perfect basal rates, mixed with some sleep deprivation ... does that all adds up to this win of a night? Or was it complete luck? Did my body need a solid night's sleep so badly that it overrode my diabetes' intentions and just let me sleep? (And, if so, how did it do that? Can it even do that??)

The world may never know, but I hope I can someday experience another slumber so sweet.

... pun intended.

* * *

Do you sleep well when your diabetes is under steady control, or is your diabetes under steady control because you sleep well? How much does a good night's sleep play into your control the next day? For me, it's a combo deal, leaving my mental chicken AND eggs ... fried. (Sorry. Couldn't resist that one.)

Hmmmmm, I've never noticed any correlation between my numbers and my sleeping patterns. I think that diabetes mostly affects my sleep negatively. And by that I mean the beeping of my CGM in the middle of the night, feeling the kitties play with my pump tubing, or rolling over just wrong onto my pump attached at my hip. Sigh....

There are some nights when I check my BS and get a reading around 110. But as I am trying to fall asleep, I just happen to drop low. Luckily, I seem to have an inability to fall asleep when I'm low, so if I can't fall asleep for over an hour, I know something's up.

Don't know from where to begin. Insulin affects your sleep. Especially your REM sleep (the one that restores the [homeostasis of] the body). Between 2-4 am is one of the scheduled diurnal pulsatile insulin secretions. Insulin counters the hypothermic effect of melatonin and adenosine and has thermogenic impact in the BAT(Brown Adipose Tissue) around the pancreas, the main function of which is to provide heat for the deeply set internal organs for normal functioning (pancreas, kidneys). If you have low BS before sleep i.e. low insulin this leads to increase of plasma adenosine, as in coffee intake, and interferes with your sleep. When the plasma levels of adenosine drop as they are supposed be in the end of the day, you go to sleep fine. Adenosine is involved in AMPK activation stimulating ATP production (energy). AMPK activation is likely the main regulator of the activity/rest pattern. In Diabetes, especially in Insulin treated one, things get tricky and complicated because of the exogenous attempt to balance cell metabolism respectively cell respiration. Things get even more boggled as during the night BAT is activated by CIT (cold-induced thermogenesis) for the reasons pointed above. The cumulative impact of the diurnal restorative insulin secretion and CIT increases Tc (core body temperature)thus supressing melatonin, the sleep hormone and results in disturbed sleep. What could be a solution in that mess? First, pay attention to your dietary habits and their effect on your BS, check your BS before sleep to make sure you are not in the dark, I don't use a pump, but from my perspective a good try will be if you switch off the pump during the night. Will that give you a high morning BS? Most likely. But that happens to dolphins too, you can google dolphins;Diabetes for that, the case is indicative. In the morning lack of insulin drives the hepatic outflux of neoglucogenesis glucose in the plasma which results in high BS. A good reference point is if you switch the pump and take measurements around 4:30 am, no it won't kill you to set the alarm once or twice if you care about your health to check the effect, and have your last meal for the day as early as you can, as it matters a lot. What you eat matters even more. Regards.

I always sleep like a ROCK (well MOST of the time), and my blood sugars sometimes will be stable all night long, but sometimes will rise or go low during the night. Then my husband needs to wake me up a lot of the time because I am sleeping so soundly! Therefore, I think you slept well because of your spot-on bolusing and basals! That's my opinion.